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Recent Editorials |
Willets Point Businesses Fight Backby Sandy Ikeda
As a follow-up on an earlier post — "The Taking of Willets Point" – I'd like to share a Crain's New York Business article that reports: A group of businesses facing eviction by the city from their homes in Willets Point, Queens, filed a federal lawsuit against the City of New York and several public officials Wednesday. It is the companies' latest effort to forestall plans for a city-backed $3 billion mixed-use project on their land.(Hat tip to Jennifer Wada.) You may recall that Mayor Bloomberg has threatened to use eminent domain against the low-income business district – or what I like to call, without derision, a "commercial slum" – because of dangerous levels of toxic filth there. As I explained earlier, however, the Catch-22 here is that this environmental hazard is itself the result of the city government's failure to provide adequate infrastructure in an area historically known as "The Iron Triangle." And that's precisely what the petitioners are basing their complaint on. The case, filed in the Eastern District federal court, seeks to force the city to provide sanitary sewers, sidewalks, paved roads and storm drains in a commercial area that has had none for more than 40 years. The suit also seeks unspecified damages, charging city officials with 'waging a campaign of intentional neglect to create and perpetuate an eyesore for eventual justification of the use of eminent domain,' according to the filing. The businesses say they've been thrown out with the bathwater.With the much-needed infrastructure in place, Willets Point stands a far better chance of fostering the kind of local entrepreneurial development that leads to organic and stable integration into the larger urban network (about which I blogged in "You Can't Build Old Buildings"). Without it, it's just an excuse for yet another bloated, financially vulnerable mega-project. Intentional or not, the government is using a dangerous condition, itself the consequence of prior public-policy failure, to justify further large-scale intervention. Now, that's the real iron triangle!
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